Tag Archives: riley sager

An atmospheric mystery rather than horror yarn. 4/5 stars.

Thank you to Penguin Random House UK and NetGalley for giving me an e-copy of this book.

The blurb:

Have you ever played two truths and a lie?Emma has. Her first summer away from home, she learned how to play the game. And she learned how to lie.

Then three of her new friends went into the woods and never returned . . .

Now, years later, Emma has been asked to go back to the newly re-opened Camp Nightingale. She thinks she’s laying old ghosts to rest but really she’s returning to the scene of a crime.

Because Emma’s innocence might be the biggest lie of all…

My take:

Last year I read and enjoyed Riley Sager’s Final Girls but struggled with the book’s pacing. The first two thirds seemed to feature little more than the characters dithering about getting themselves into trouble unnecessarily before the blistering final third went a long way towards making up for all the preamble. Last Time I Lied doesn’t suffer from the same issue. The action is evenly paced. The chapters tend to alternate between the present and the past incident when Emma’s three cabin mates went missing. The present day narrative gets going quickly and the relevant events from the past are dripped in nicely to keep things moving forward and ramp up suspense.

A slow-burning thriller with a decent final pay-off. 3.5/5.

Thank you to Random House UK and NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book. Final Girls will be published on 13th July.

The blurb:Each girl survived an unthinkable horror. Now someone wants them dead…

They were the victims of separate massacres. Grouped together by the press, and dubbed the Final Girls, they are treated like something fresh out of a slasher movie.

When something terrible happens to Lisa, put-together Quincy and volatile Sam finally meet. Each one influences the other. Each one has dark secrets. And after the bloodstained fingers of the past reach into the present, each one will never be the same…

My take

The premise here is terrific. The question “what happens to the lone survivor once the credits of a horror movie end”? makes for a great set up and interesting story. However, I felt the overall pacing of the narrative was slightly off.